pctechguide.com

  • Home
  • Guides
  • Tutorials
  • Articles
  • Reviews
  • Glossary
  • Contact

Motherboard Upgrade Reasons

A motherboard is the backbone of a PC system, connecting all its various components and peripherals and influencing your choice of precisely what these might be. It is, of critical importance both in terms of system performance and connectivity.

It follows, therefore, that there are numerous reasons for deciding to upgrade your motherboard:

  • to enable an upgrade to a faster processor
  • to allow use more or faster memory
  • to support a faster AGP graphics card
  • to support the latest internal bus technologies, such as ATA/133 or Serial ATA
  • to enable you to use external peripherals using USB or FireWire technology
  • to increase your expansion slot potential.

Apart from performance/connectivity factors, the principal compatibility issues that will govern your choice of motherboard are the type of CPU you want it to support – Intel or AMD – and whether it’ll work in your existing system case.

Depending on its age, you may find that your system case may limit your choice when it comes to a motherboard upgrade, since it may be designed to support only one of the two mainstream motherboard form factors of the past decade.

The Baby AT was the dominant motherboard standard during the period 1993-1997. It shares many of the characteristics of its predecessor – the AT form factor – both having a single, full-sized keyboard connector soldered onto the board their serial and parallel ports attached to the system case and connected to the motherboard itself through pin headers. The principal difference was in size, a BAT board being significantly narrower than an AT model, at 8.5in compared to 12in.

Issues were eventually to emerge with respect to the BAT design though, principally concerning the positioning of the CPU and memory sockets, which often prohibited the use of longer bus cards, thereby restricting choice and flexibility.

The ATX form factor was designed to address these issues. Fundamentally, the ATX design rotates that of the BAT through 90 degrees, relocating the processor away from the expansion slots – which can therefore accommodate full-length cards – and allowing the longer side of the board to be used to host more on-board I/O.

While some system cases can accommodate both a BAT and ATX form factors, it is their power supply unit that will limit your choice to one or the other, since this will be designed either for use either with the pair of near-identical 6-pin connectors used by the BAT form factor or the single 20-pin connector used by ATX motherboards.

Indeed, PSU compatibility is even more of an issue for Pentium 4 based systems, since many of these will require a new new 2×2, 4-pin 12V connector in addition to a standard 2×10, 20-pin ATX power connector and may – depending on the chipset they use – also require a separate 6-pin AUX power connector.

It is for this reason that it will sometimes be sensible to upgrade your system case at the same time as your motherboard!

  • Motherboard Upgrade Reasons
  • Motherboard Removal
  • Motherboard CPU
  • Motherboard Heatsinks
  • Motherboard Memory Identification
  • Motherboard Memory Installation
  • Motherboard Fit
  • Motherboard Power
  • Motherboard Panel
  • Motherboard Fan
  • Motherboard USB Ports
  • Motherboard FireWire Ports
  • Motherboard Audio
  • Motherboard Testing
  • Motherboard Floppy Connections
  • Motherboard IDE Connections
  • BIOS Settings
  • Motherboards and Win98
  • Motherboards and WinXP

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Related

Filed Under: How to Upgrade Your Motherboard

Latest Articles

WAP

WAP Definition: Wireless Application Protocol: a protocol that enables Internet services to be delivered to small-screen mobile devices. The application via which WAP-enabled devices access Web content is referred to as a "micro-browser". … [Read More...]

DiskImage 5 Review

DiskImage 5 Review

PROS: DiskImage comes with uncomplicated menus and options. It allows for a full image data backup of your computer. CONS: There are no controls to reduce systems resources. OVERVIEW: DiskImage is a disk imaging tool. Simply put, it makes a copy of your computer's disk drive, so if your … [Read More...]

Free Back up Data: Pro-Trick of IT on Virtual Hard Drives (VHD)

  If you decided to back up your files/data, did you consider VHD or virtual hard drive? It’s been years when the IT professionals used Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) in server applications and virtual machines, however, you can also use them freely with few clicks for backup format by the use of … [Read More...]

Comments

  1. bab says

    November 5, 2011 at 7:47 pm

    nice

2021 PC Hardware Releases to Bolster Your Gaming

If you are a PC gamer, then chances are you are looking to upgrade your kit over the coming year. However, a lot of money can go into building the … [Read More...]

New Transfer Feature in Dropbox Enable Sharing files with Third Parties

Dropbox has been a popular P2P sharing platform for many years. They don't announce new features as often as other applications, since they have a … [Read More...]

Ransomware Operators Find Data Theft Profitable

How valuable is your data? That’s not a question that organizations or individuals have to ask themselves all that often. You might know the market … [Read More...]

Engineers Encounter the Quantum Challenge with Computers Running a Hundred Million Times Faster

Quantum computers have been a subject of discussion for many years. They have probably been something that philosophers and technology pundits have … [Read More...]

Transferring Image Files from Your Cell Phone Without Cables or Email

You don't have a cable available to transfer the photos from your cell phone to your computer? You don't feel comfortable sending them through your … [Read More...]

Why Drupal Accessibility is Vital for Your Website

Drupal may not be as popular as WordPress, but it is still used in over 1 million websites. The Internet might be more conducive to our needs if more … [Read More...]

Guides

  • Computer Communications
  • Mobile Computing
  • PC Components
  • PC Data Storage
  • PC Input-Output
  • PC Multimedia
  • Processors (CPUs)

Recent Posts

Guidelines on Processing Big Data with Hadoop

We are observing an increasing number of social and industrial applications where the flow of data and information grows at an exponential rate, which … [Read More...]

Correct the 401 Unauthorized Error

The 401 Error is a common HTML Error Code you may encounter while surfing on the Internet. The error is usually shown because the page you are trying … [Read More...]

Monitor Technologies: Slotted Mask

Capitalising on the advantages of both the shadow mask and aperture grill approaches, NEC has developed a hybrid mask type which uses a slot-mask … [Read More...]

[footer_backtotop]

Copyright © 2021 About | Privacy | Contact Information | Wrtie For Us | Disclaimer | Copyright License | Authors